Winning Performance Engineering Strategy for your next Banking Platform Replacement Project

Reliability is key for a core banking platform. In this post I will give you some learnings and insights into a successful core banking performance engineering strategy.

Lessons learned

1. Clarify defect tracking process and responsibilities upfront

2. Agree on deployment slots for your test environment

3. Data sets can have massive impact on end to end response times. Make sure that data volumes, roles and permissions are in line with current production.

4. Carefully check response time, throughput and data volume requirements.

5. Non-functional requirements are key for a successful load and performance test. Focus your efforts on NFRs and once they are approved start with production like load and performance test execution.

6. Weekly status reports are a must. Make sure that content is aligned with other streams and report overall status, defects, test execution progress and blocking issues regularly.

Fundamental performance engineering approach

Test Planning

1. Conduct Performance Risk Assessment to identify the scope

2. Specify performance requirements

3. Document test approach

Test Implementation

1. Real browser based end-to-end use cases

2. API based web service requests

3. Manage test data, permissions and infrastructure constraints

Monitoring

1. APM

2. UEM

3. Infrastructure

4. Synthetic Requests

Test Execution

1. Benchmarking of Base Stack Infrastructure

2. Single application tests

3. Combined tests to simulate production load on all apps at the same time

4. Actual and future growth patterns

Test Reporting

1. Create test reports in lightweight wiki pages

2. Focus on key performance metrics

Defect Tracking

1. Agreed on defect assignment rules

2. Use tags for your defects tracking

3. Created reporting dashboards

4. Bi-weekly defect review sessions

Tools used

1. Performance Testing – Silk Performer, SilkCentral

2. Performance Monitoring – dynatrace

3. Synthetic Monitoring – Silk Performance Manager

4. Defect Tracking – Jira

5. Reporting – Confluence and Sharepoint

6. Test Management – Spira

This full list of learnings and advices will help you in your next performance engineering project to identify hotspots quickly without jumping in too many pitfalls.